Since the millennium, Korean films have entered an era of incomparably prosperous full bloom. Domestic commercial films are constantly breaking box-office records, and art films at international film festivals have introduced one after another to the film industry with a distinctive and extremely style. Influential directors: Lee Chang-dong, Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon-ho, and Kim Ki-duk are definitely among the top Korean directors in the millennium, and Park Chan-wook has the strongest author style. His works are known for being dark and weird, and he does not shy away from bloody violence and pornographic scenes. The influence of his "revenge trilogy" has far surpassed South Korea and spread to the European and American film circles. Among them, "The Cannes Jury Award" "Old Boy" was even remade into an English version by Hollywood.
After entering the 2010s, Park Chan-wook finally got the opportunity to shoot his first English-language film "Stoke". It is indeed a mystery that this intensely styled work did not go to the three major European film festivals. However, this English-language film did not prevent him from showing first-class audio-visual skills, and successfully transplanted the author's style of the past into the story of the exotic background, without any symptoms of acclimatization encountered by other Asian author-directors. Therefore, the loyal fans who look forward to the dark theme of human nature or bloody violence will not be disappointed, and the advanced fans who love audio-visual skills relish every detail in the film, enough to set off waves of climaxes.
In contrast, it is more surprising that Park Chan-wook chose this non-original script, because the performance space of this script is relatively narrow, and it is a bit old-fashioned B-movie format. I later learned that it was writer and "Prison Break" star Wentworth Miller's tribute to Hitchcock's suspense master. Moving such a long-term character behavior and dramatic plot to a contemporary setting will inevitably lead to an out of date look. Director Park Chan-wook obviously saw the weakness of this script, so he shifted the focus to the topic of girls' growth, but it was still difficult to conceal the killing plot. Ridiculous and empty.
The expression of the male protagonist when he appeared was too deliberate, a bit comical, and he was eager to tell the audience that he was a lunatic with mental problems. Halfway through the story, the heroine is bullied by a male classmate at school, and the camera captures her and her uncle's gaze. Afterwards, the passage where the heroine and her uncle play the piano together again emphasizes the same genetic attributes of the two bloodlines. This kind of suggestive picture has completely leaked the focus of the story. Therefore, the second half of the plot is not so much a depiction of the girl's confusion and unease in the process of growing up, it is better to say that the director borrows the cover of the disease to fully expose his hobby of cult slaughter. This may be a limitation of the script, or it may be a lack of foreshadowing of the heroine's psychological description. In short, after reading it, there is absolutely no hearty catharsis pleasure of the previous revenge trilogy, only a comic-style exaggeration and unsympathetic petty spirit.
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